The Ku Klux Klan was imported to South Carolina from Tennessee, where it had originated. During South Carolina’s election campaign this year the Klan murdered 8 blacks, two of them state congressmen.
Links: Tennessee, South Carolina, KKK

1870 Mar 31

The US Congress passed the Enforcement Act, which attempted to prevent the Ku Klux Klan from violating citizen’s constitutional protections, but the law produced little result.
Links: USA, Black History, KKK

1870 Oct 10

In South Carolina Republican Gov. Robert Scott (1826-1900) was re-elected, on the strength of the black vote, enraging members of the Ku Klux Klan. A wave of terror began the following day.
Links: USA, Black History, South Carolina, KKK

President Grant ordered the South Carolina Ku Klux Klan to disperse and disarm in five days.
Links: USA, South Carolina, KKK, GrantU

1871 Oct 17

President Grant suspended writ of habeas corpus in South Carolina in response to violence by the KKK. It applied to all arrests made by US marshals and federal troops in nine of the state’s western counties. By the end of November some 600 arrests were made.
Links: USA, Black History, South Carolina, KKK, GrantU

Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia began winning elections when his local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan picked him as its leader. He was elected a US Senator in 1959.
Links: USA, West Virginia, KKK

1964 May 2

In Mississippi Charles Moore (19) and Henry Dee (19) were beaten and killed by local members of the Ku Klux Klan. Their mutilated bodies were later found in the Mississippi River while federal authorities searched for civil rights workers Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner. Charles Marcus Edwards and James Ford Seale were arrested for the crime, but neither was tried. In 2007 James Ford Seale (71) was arrested and charged with two counts of kidnapping and one count of conspiracy to commit kidnapping. In 2008 an appeals court ruled that the statue of limitations had expired overturning Seale’s conviction.
Links: USA, Black History, Murder, Mississippi, KKK

Viola Liuzzo (b.1925), a white civil rights worker from Detroit, was shot and killed by the Ku Klux Klan on a road near Selma, Ala. The later trial of Collie Leroy Jenkins, one of 3 men charged in the killing, ended in a hung jury. Jenkins was also acquitted at a 2nd trial but was later convicted along with Eugene Thomas of civil rights violations in federal court and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Links: USA, Black History, Murder, Michigan, Alabama, KKK

1979 Nov 3

Five radicals were killed when gunfire erupted during an anti-Ku Klux Klan demonstration in Greensboro, N.C., after a caravan of Klansmen and Nazis had driven into the area. Named 'The Greensboro Massacre', the five marchers were shot to death in broad daylight and another 8 were wounded.
Links: USA, North Carolina, KKK

1981 Mar 20

Michael Donald (b.1961), a black teenager in Mobile, Alabama, was abducted, tortured and killed in what prosecutors charged was a Ku Klux Klan plot. Henry Hays (d.1997) murdered Michael Donald in a random abduction. Donald was beaten, cut, strangled and his body was strung up a tree. Hays was convicted and sentenced to death. He was executed Jun 6, 1997. In 1987 A wrongful death suit filed by Donald’s mother gave a $7 million verdict against the United Klans of America, led by Robert Shelton (d.2003 at 73).
Links: USA, Black History, Murder, Alabama, KKK

1987 Jan 24

About 20,000 civil rights demonstrators marched through predominantly white Forsyth County, Ga., a week after a smaller march was disrupted by Ku Klux Klan members and supporters.
Links: GeorgiaUS, USA, KKK

1987 Feb 12

In Alabama surviving relatives of a black man murdered by KKK members were awarded $7 million in damages.
Links: USA, Black History, Alabama, KKK

A wrongful death suit filed by Michael Donald’s mother gave a $7 million verdict against the United Klans of America. In 1981 Ku Klux Klansman Henry Hays had murdered Donald, a 19-year-old black man, in a random abduction. Donald was beaten, cut, strangled and his body was strung up a tree. Hays was convicted and sentenced to death. He was executed Jun 6, 1997.
Links: USA, KKK

1989 Jan 21

Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke led a field of seven candidates in an open primary to advance to a runoff election for a Louisiana state House seat.
Links: USA, Louisiana, KKK

1991 Nov 16

Former Louisiana Gov. Edwin Edwards won a landslide victory in his bid to return to office, defeating state representative David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader.
Links: USA, Louisiana, KKK

1992 Sep 14

The grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan's Invisible Empire of Florida announced that he was moving the group's headquarters from Orlando to Gainesville. He said, it's "a progressive community, and we think we can fit in."
Links: USA, Florida, KKK

1995 Jun 201995 Jun 21

The Mount Zion AME Church in Greeleyville, S.C., was destroyed by fire. On the next day the Macedonia Baptist Church in Bloomville was burned. In 1996 two KKK members, Gary Cox and Timothy Welch, were charged in federal court for setting the fires. They pleaded guilty on 8/14/96. Former Klansmen Hubert Rowell and Arthur Haley pleaded guilty to 4 counts of conspiracy in the fires in Dec 1996. In 1998 the Christian Knights of KKK and Horace King, Grand Dragon of South Carolina, were ordered to pay $37.8 million in damages for the burning of the Macedonia Baptist church.
Links: USA, South Carolina, Fire, KKK

TimelinesA text-based site.

1996 Oct 27

In South Carolina Joshua Grant Kennedy, a Ku Klux Klan member, fired 11 times into a crowd of black teenagers outside a nightclub and wounded three teens. Kennedy was sentenced to 26 years in prison in 1998.
Links: South Carolina, KKK

1998 Aug 21

Samuel Bowers, a 73-year-old former Ku Klux Klan leader, was convicted in Hattiesburg, Miss., of ordering a 1966 firebombing that killed civil rights activist Vernon Dahmer. Bowers died in prison in November 2006 at age 82.
Links: USA, Black History, Mississippi, KKK

1999 Oct 23

A Ku Klux Klan rally was allowed to proceed in NYC with no masks as thousands of counter-demonstrators jeered them. 16 Klansmen and 2 Klan women appeared at Foley Square along with some 6,000 protestors and 2,000 tourists.
Links: USA, NYC, KKK

2000 May 17

Two former Ku Klux Klansmen were arrested on murder charges in the 1963 church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four black girls. Thomas Blanton Junior was convicted and sentenced to life in prison May 1, 2001. Bobby Frank Cherry was indicted in 2000 and later convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
Links: USA, Alabama, KKK

2001 May 1

Thomas Blanton Jr. became the second ex-Ku Klux Klansman to be convicted in the 1963 bombing of a church in Birmingham, Ala., that claimed the lives of four black girls.
Links: Alabama, KKK

A judge in Alabama ruled that former Ku Klux Klansman Bobby Frank Cherry was mentally competent to stand trial on murder charges in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four black girls. Cherry was later convicted, and served a life sentence until his death in November 2004.
Links: USA, Black History, Alabama, KKK

2004 Nov 18

Former Ku Klux Klansman Bobby Frank Cherry (74), who was convicted of killing four black girls in a racially motivated bombing of a Birmingham, Ala., church in 1963, died in prison.
Links: USA, Alabama, KKK

2005 Jun 23

Former Ku Klux Klansman Edgar Ray Killen was sentenced to 60 years in prison for the 1964 Mississippi slayings of three civil rights workers.
Links: USA, Mississippi, KKK

2007 Jun 14

In Mississippi Klansman James Ford Seale (71) was convicted on federal charges of kidnapping and conspiracy in the 1964 deaths of Charles Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee. Seale faced life in prison with sentencing on Aug 24.
Links: USA, Black History, Mississippi, KKK

2008 Nov 9

In Louisiana Raymond "Chuck" Foster, 44, shot and killed an Oklahoma woman, who was lured over the Internet to take part in a Ku Klux Klan initiation, after a fight broke out when she asked to be taken back to town. The group tried to cover it up by dumping her body on a rural roadside and setting her belongings aflame. Foster, the local Klan leader was soon in jail on a second-degree murder charge, and seven others were charged with trying to help conceal the crime.
Links: USA, Louisiana, Murder, Oklahoma, KKK

David Duke (59), the former Grand Wizard of the Louisiana-founded Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, arrived in Prague at the invitation of a local far-right group, Narodni Odpor (National Resistance). He was soon arrested and questioned for several hours on suspicion of promoting movements seeking the suppression of human rights. Duke was freed during the night and forced to leave the country the next day.
Links: Louisiana, Czech Rep., KKK

2012 Sep 13

A Ku Klux Klan chapter sued the state of Georgia for rejecting the white supremacist group's application to "adopt" a stretch of highway.
Links: GeorgiaUS, KKK

2016 Feb 27

In southern California three people were stabbed, one of them critically, and 13 others were arrested when a Ku Klux Klan rally erupted into clashes with counter-protesters.
Links: USA, California, KKK